The charging rhinoceros of English letters

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

12:01AM BST 26 Jun 2005

Don't judge a book by its cover - especially when the cover in question is already heavy with judgments. Thus Joseph Heller's praise, gratefully reprinted on the back of this collection: "He jousts with fraudulence of every stripe and always wins. I regret he has only one life, one mind." That manages to be cautious as well as generous (it's only a small step from being single-minded to being bloody-minded), but the image of Hitchens jousting doesn't quite ring true. It sounds altogether too chivalrous, too sportive for the way he usually sets about his enemies. Get on the wrong side of his pen, and you're unlikely to feel that you've been elegantly skewered by a lance. It's more like being charged down by an enraged rhinoceros. Who proceeds to tap-dance on your head. And then kicks you off a cliff.

This volume is strewn with the mangled and splattered remains of his enemies. POW! "I never know whether [Michael Moore] is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible." BIFF! "John Kennedy was a physical and probably mental also-ran for most of his presidency." CRRRUNCH! "Nice old ladies" he meets in bookshops ask him worriedly "if there wasn't anyone or anything I liked". Yet, on the evidence presented here, there are some people and things he likes. He likes his adopted home of America, despite the "swaying, pachydermous haunches" of some of its citizens; bars, which reappear with a soothing regularity in his prose; books, especially by authors who depict the world not only as it is, but also as it might be. But even here Hitchens's praise is spiked. He describes how Evelyn Waugh gradually sank into "port-sodden Blimpery", or how Malcolm Muggeridge's saintliness compromised by a face like "vain old turtle".

This is a mixed bag, in which pieces generated by the heat and smoke of 9/11 jostle with slighter essays on Bob Dylan and the masturbatory excesses of Ulysses (a back-handed compliment to what is far from being a one-handed read), although the labels of "Love" and "Poverty" are stretched. When "War" is reached, finally, he is on familiar ground. War is his home-key.

Perhaps this is inevitable in a writer who believes that "there can be no progress without head-on confrontation", and reserves his highest praise for those prepared to fight not only other people but themselves: Kipling is applauded for being "a man of permanent contradictions"; Huxley "often held and expressed diametrically opposite opinions". Still, it seems disingenuous to argue that "No serious person is without contradictions", and then to complain that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is full of them. But perhaps this sort of self-contradictoriness is simply a mark of Hitchens's seriousness. He certainly seems reluctant to admit that, in Heller's terms, he has only one life, one mind. He has two, at least: Christopher Hitchens, mild-mannered man of letters; and his superhero alter ego The Hitch, forever ready to fight the forces of evil: "Any time, Michael my boy… Let's see what you're made of." POW! BIFF! CRRRUNCH!

Yet for all the awkward body-checks in this book, there are times when Hitchens writes so well that you would forgive him almost anything. This is not just because of his willingness to say the unsayable (a far braver task than merely thinking the unthinkable), or his dead-pan ability to poke fun at himself. The core of his writing, his centre of gravity, is his style: each sentence fitting its thought like a glove. Reading his Vanity Fair pieces about travelling across America - the professional outsider in a country that itself doesn't always feel at home in the world - the writing is so precise, so careful not to slip from the delicately wrought to the overwrought, that, as he says of Waugh, "One yearns to quote or excerpt the whole of it."

Two sentences from his meditation on Sunset Boulevard suffice: "Sunset did not uncurl itself toward the ocean like some blind tendril seeking the light. It fought its way as part of a process of ambition and acquisition that still shows at every bend." That's a superb description of the way in which this particular road came to stand for the American dream. It's also a pretty good description of Hitchens's own style.